Mike Arauz's Blog – The Archives

Check out more of my Slideshare docs here.

This is the presentation I gave Monday at the Future Trends Conference in Miami. Lots of good people there, and I'm sorry I wasn't able to stay for all three days.

The proliferation of mobile technology and the rapid integration of both access to the web and access to our social graph via our mobile device demands that we begin to design experiences that were previously thought of as "off line" to spread online.

Digital technology, and the role that it plays in our lives, has evolved dramatically over the past 10 years. Think about how constantly we now rely on digital technology to communicate with each other, to get information, to entertain ourselves, to organize collective action, and to document our lives.

Now think about how many of those experiences now take place within the context of your social graph, within the context of the aggregate of all of your digital relationships. Every digital experience we have now is connected to our digital relationships.

The way that we live our lives and experience the world around us has always been social. But, digital social networks are fundamentally different because they take our basic human desires to explore our identity, our relationships, and our place in society, and makes those desires explicit. Figuring out who we are, who our friends are, and how we fit in, used to be intuitive; now all of those questions are broadcast, shared, archived, searchable, and deliberate.

The era of Spreadable Media is now at hand. Videos, links, and other digital experiences do not spread by themselves. They spread because we choose to spread them. And we choose to spread content for 3 reasons: to strengthen my bond, to define our collective identity, and to gain status.

In order to design digital experiences that can spread, you need to know the network you're trying to engage, understand their shared desires, and give them the tools they need to share the experience.

That's what's going on with the web. Now consider how quickly web-based social behaviors are becoming integrated into our mobile experiences:

• Mobile internet adoption has reached over 50 million users (via iPhone and iPod Touch) more than twice as quickly as it took regular internet adoption to reach that same penetration (via Netscape) (source)


• The number of people using social network sites on mobile devices more than doubled from July 2008 to July 2009 (source)


• The % of mobile web users posting status updates via Twitter or another service has now reached 25% (source)


• Facebook now has over 65 million mobile users, approximately 26% of all active users (source)

Mobile technology is making every experience both digital and social. That means that the experiences that we previously thought of as happening "off line" now play by the same rules as online experiences. The same principles that make things spread online now need to be applied to real world experiences to help them spread in the digital space.

There are a few interesting technologies that have popped up in the past year that I think have a role to play in this new reality.

Mobile Location-based Apps

• Foursquare


• Brightkite


• Loopt


• Gowalla


• Google Latitude

Mobile Augmented Reality

• MIT Sixth Sense prototype (TED Talk)


• Layar


• Wikitude


• Nearest Subway


• Yelp Monocle


• TAT Augmented ID


• My own concepts: facial recognition and social tagging